WILLIAM LANE CRAIG
Erlangen, West Germany
1
Death and Resurrection
THE MODERN PREDICAMENT
Man, writes Loren Eiseley, is the Cosmic Orphan.1 He is the only creature in the universe who asks, Why? Other animals are guided by instincts, but man has learned to ask questions. That is why he is an orphan.
For many centuries man believed that the universe was created by God and that He had placed man on the Earth. But this world view broke apart like an ill-nailed raft caught in a torrent. Space, which had been thought to be a small and homey place for man, suddenly widened into infinity. The earth was seen to be a mere speck drifting in the wake of a minor star, itself rotating around an immense galaxy composed of innumerable suns. Beyond and beyond, billions of light years away, other galaxies vast and innumerable glowed through clouds of wandering gas and interstellar dust. Man finally knew that he was alone in the indifferent immensity of the universe.
“Who am I?” the Orphan cried. And science answered back,
You are a changeling. You are linked by a genetic chain to all the vertebrates. The thing that is you bears the still aching wounds of evolution in body and in brain. Your hands are made-over fins, your lungs come from a creature gasping in a swamp, your femur has been twisted upright. Your foot is a reworked climbing pad. You are a rag doll resewn from the skins of extinct animals. Long ago, 2,000,000 years perhaps, you were smaller, your brain was not so large. We are not confident that you could speak. Seventy million years before that you were an even smaller climbing creature known as a tupaiid. You were the size of a rat. You ate insects. Now you fly to the Moon.2
As the Cosmic Orphan looked to his past he saw only the purposeless, blind processes of mutation and natural selection. Now as he looks to his future, he sees—death. Eiseley relates how this reality was brought home to him as a youth:
When I was a young lad of that indefinite but important age when one begins to ask, Who am I? Why am I here? What is the nature of my kind? What is growing up? What is the world? How long shall I live in it? Where shall I go? I found myself walking with a small companion over a high railroad trestle that spanned a stream, a country bridge, and a road. One could look fearfully down, between the ties, at the shallows and ripples in the shining water some 50 feet below. One was also doing a forbidden thing, against which our parents constantly warned. One must not be caught on the black bridge by a train. Something terrible might happen, a thing called death.
From the abutment of the bridge we gazed down upon the water and saw among the pebbles the shape of an animal we knew only from picture books—a turtle, a very large, dark mahogany-coloured turtle. We scrambled down the embankment to observe him more closely. From the little bridge a few feet above the stream, I saw that the turtle, whose beautiful markings shone in the afternoon sun, was not alive and that his flippers waved aimlessly in the rushing water. The reason for his death was plain. Not too long before we had come upon the trestle, someone engaged in idle practice with a repeating rifle had stitched a row of bullet holes across the turtle’s carapace and sauntered on.
My father had once explained to me that it took a long time to make a big turtle, years really, in the sunlight and the water and the mud. I turned the ancient creature over and fingered the etched shell with its forlorn flippers flopping grotesquely. The question rose up unbidden. Why did the man have to kill something living that could never be replaced? I laid the turtle down in the water and gave it a little shove. It entered the current and began to drift away. ‘Let’s go home,’ I said to my companion. From that moment I think I began to grow up.3
Eiseley’s beautiful and melancholy prose describes poignantly the predicament of modern man. Lost in a universe without God, he is truly the Cosmic Orphan. He was thrown into life as an accidental product of nature, and he faces inevitable extinction in death. His lot is only made more bitter and more tragic by the fact that he of all creatures is aware of it.
But the reason modern man is an orphan is not simply, as Eiseley intimates, because man is a product of evolution or because he asks, Why? It is not even because he is doomed to die. Modern man is an orphan because he has lost God. An orphan is a child without parents. If God existed, then even if He created man by means of evolution, man would still be His child. If His child asked, “Why?” there would be an answer in God. Even if man’s life ended at the grave, God would still be man’s parent.
Modern man is the Cosmic Orphan because he has killed God. And, by doing so, he has reduced himself to an accident of nature. When he asks, Why? his cry is lost in the silence of the recesses of space. When he dies, he dies without hope. Thus, in killing God, modern man has killed himself as well.
It is the absence of God that ultimately makes man the Cosmic Orphan. It is the grim finality of death that makes his life a tragedy. Even if God did exist and had created man, it would still be a tragedy if a personal being like man should have no better fate than to be forever extinguished in death. Death is certainly man’s greatest enemy. In losing God, modern man has lost immortality as well. Death means eternal annihilation. This prospect robs life of its meaning and fullness. It makes the life of man no better than the life of a cow or horse, only more tragic. In light of death, the activities that cram our life seem so pointless. Thus Archibald MacLeish described the life of man as an idiotic circus—until one day the show is all over:
Quite unexpectedly as Vasserot
The armless ambidextrian was lighting
A match between his great and second toe
And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting
The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum
Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough
In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb—
Quite unexpectedly the top blew off:
And there, there overhead, there, there, hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the canceled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing—nothing at all.
“The End of the World”
Herein lies the horror of modern man: because he ultimately ends in nothing, he is nothing. The playwright Samuel Beckett also understands this. In his play Waiting for Godot, two men carry on trivial conversation for the entire duration of the play while waiting for a third man to arrive. But he never comes. Our lives are like that, Beckett is saying. We just kill time, waiting—for nothing. In another tragic portrayal of the life of man, Beckett opens the curtain to reveal a stage littered with junk. For several long seconds, the audience stares in silence at that junk. Then the curtain closes. That is all.
If there is no immortality, then the life that man does have becomes absurd. To make the situation worse, life is itself only a mixed blessing, for at least four reasons.
First, there is the evil in the heart of man, which expresses itself in man’s terrible inhumanity to man. Many people wonder how God could create a world with so much evil in it. But they seem to overlook the fact that most of that evil is the result of man’s free choices. War, torture, theft, rape, jealousy, and a thousand other sins are man’s own actions. Prior to the twentieth century, people tended to be optimistic about man. The popular slogan was “Every day in every way I am getting better and better.” Around the turn of the century a liberal theological magazine called The Christian Century was founded. That is what they thought the twentieth century would be. Then came World War I—and then World War II. No longer could man portray himself as an innocent child. Something was radically wrong with him. This conviction is powerfully displayed in Joseph Conrad’s novel The Heart of Darkness. The title of the novel refers, not to the heart of deepest Africa, where the story takes place, but to the heart of man himself. As the dying man in the story looks into his own heart, his last words are, “The horror! The horror!”